John Piper Quotes

Adoption is the visible Gospel.

I sometimes fear that we have so redefined conversion in terms of human decisions and have so removed any necessity of the experience of God’s Spirit, that many people think they are saved when in fact they only have Christian ideas in their head not spiritual power in their heart.

Journaling is a way to be a good steward of the Spirit’s illuminations.

God aims to look valuable in the world, and that happens when we treasure him above all else.

Every criticism or slight against you, warranted or not, received or endured humbly, is written in heaven for your reward.

Every good thing in the Christian life grows in the soil of humility. Without humility, every virtue and every grace withers. That’s why Calvin said humility is first, second, and third in the Christian faith.

Nothing is more vital than prayer in Christian existence, and few things are more vulnerable to neglect.

We can say that true gratitude does not give rise to the debtor’s ethic because it gives rise to faith in future grace. With true gratitude there is such a delight in the worth of God’s past grace, that we are driven on to experience more and more of it in the future…it is done by transforming gratitude into faith as it turns from contemplating the pleasures of past grace and starts contemplating the promises of the future.

You can’t make yourself saved. This is very threatening to people, even Christians, because of what it seems to say about freedom.

What is God looking for in the world? Assistants? No. The gospel is not a help-wanted ad. It is a help-available ad. God is not looking for people to work for Him but people who let Him work mightily in and through them.

If we were made to watch a doctor pull off the little baby’s legs and arms one by one and place them on the table like a dentist removing cotton from your mouth – if all Americans were made to see what it really is, the pro-life goal of abortion being unthinkable (not just illegal) would be much nearer.

The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.